Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.4.0 Alpha – The jQuery Mobile team announce the release of jQuery Mobile 1.4 alpha, an earlty preview of the work they are doing on improving the performance and reviewing the widgets available for the next significant release.

Advise the .NET Framework Team – Rich Lander solicits and discusses what the team do with the feedback you give them on things like the .NET Framework 4.5.1 preview, discussing the split between the ‘real time’ fix now and the ‘forward looking’ feature requests.

Information

What is the type of the null literal? – Eric Lippert discusses the strange and wonderful world of the null literal, and what type it should be considered to be according to the specification, and the difficulty the team had in deciding this.

Community

New Windows Azure Benefits for MSDN Subscribers! – Channel 9 – Scott Guthrie announce a competition to win an Aston Martin V8 Vantage by taking up the free Windows Azure benefit included in MSDN Subscriptions. I wonder if there is any significance in the fact that this is ScottGu and the car is red?!?

Software

Major upgrades to Xamarin’s platform: Async is here – Miguel de Icaza announces the exciting news that the Xamarin platform will now features C# async/await support (bringing it in line with C#5), along with providing async method support for the native platform APIs as well.

MSBuild is now part of Visual Studio! – Will Buik highlights the news that MSBuild has now become part of Visual Studio, and along with this that there is now a stand alone package for the compilers and MSBuild which comes as part of Visual Studio 2013

Azure SQL Data Premium Now Available – Bryan Group highlights the preview of the new Windows Azure SQL Data Premium package, providing more performance guarantees for cloud hosted SQL.

Information

Free APress e-book on GIT! – Tatworth highlights a free e-book from APress on the Git version control systems – something well worth getting a limited understanding of even if you don’t currently use it.

Victory Lap for Ask Patents – Joel Spolsky discusses the evilness of software patents, the lengths that companies go to secure patents, and also how it can be possible to overturn patents

dotTrace 5.5 Performance is Released! – JetBrains announce the release of dotTrace 5.5, their latest version of their code profiler. This release integrates nicely with ReSharper 8 and adda s bunch of new features.

Scriptcs and multiline REPL! – Filip W gives an update on some recent changes to the ScriptCS REPL environment, and highlights the new, not yet released in stable build multi-line constructs in the REPL.

The Right Tests in the Wrong Order – Mike Jansen discusses the importance of the order of developing your tests for Test Driven Development and how it relates to the overfall understanding of the practice, and getting the best results out of it.